Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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your support. So the Democrats Hamas strategy ended the same
way as Hamas's war on Israel ended, which makes sense
because it was the Hamas strategy. Right, at some point,
you cannot sustain the losses. And if the entire strategy
is built around making your own people suffer so you
can gain leverage from a pr standpoint, then at some
point you are always going to have to come to
the table and cave somehow, right, And that's exactly what
we saw the Democrats do coincidentally right after the election. Right, Oh,
this is not good news for Chuck Schuma. Not good news.
I don't understand. Well, I've got yeah, like I've got
a lot of reaction from people who know a lot
more of the inside ballgame that was going on up
there in DC About all of this, Bonchie, a writer
at RedState dot com, notes the irony here that for
the last forty days, whether there's something biblical about this anyway,
the last forty days, the Democrats and the media, but
I repeat myself, they have been screaming that Republicans are
the ones that shut down the government and that's bad.
And then as soon as these eight Democrats broke ranks
with leadership or maybe they were given permission to do
so by leadership, and voted with the Republicans to break
the legislative filibuster. Now those same people who were saying
that the government shutdown is bad, now they're mad that
the shutdown is ending. Well, which is it, people, John Thune?
This is according to Chris Slizza. Chris Solizza is a
long time journalist frequent talking head on MSNBC, and he said,
to be clear, John Thune, the Republican majority leader and
Senate Republicans offered this exact deal that Democrats are now taking.
He offered this weeks ago. Oh so this is not
even a new deal. He gave it to them weeks ago.
He says, why is it now when seven Senate Democrats
decide to give in. Gosh, it's a brain buster. We
may never know the reason why. Actually we do know
the reason why. It's because now they are hitting air
traffic controllers. You've got flight cancellations and such going on.
You got the snap funds that are drawing up, and
they're passed the election, right, they got past their no
Kings rally. Remember, in fact, hang on one second, let
me go through the stack of stuff and bring back
this nugget from last week. Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, Republican.
He told Fox News that Chuck Schumer held a closed
door meeting with Senate Democrats and told them to wait
until after the elections to reopen the government quote, because
they were afraid their base would not show up today
in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City. Last week,
Dick Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, wanted to break with Democrats
and reopen it, but he was told not to just
wait till after the election. That was last week. Mark
Wayne Mullen said that I gave you that quote last week,
and lo and behold, here we are after the election.
First vote that comes down, and boom, you've got a
whole bunch of defectors. So let me go over here
to This is the Independent Journal Review IJR dot com.
Progressive Democratic lawmakers. House minority Leader Hakim Jeffries excoriated a
deal Sunday negotiated by fellow members of their party to
reopen the government. Right because the lefties are at least
feigning outrage. Now, look, I get it. The radical base
of their party. They are outraged. They are super mad
at Chuck Schumer. I think he's done. He might be done.
I don't know if he's going to run for reelection
in twenty six or is it twenty six. I think
it's twenty six. Yeah, yeah, he may be done. The
knives are out for this guy now. And that's why,
in fact I have his his feigned outrage from the
floor where he spoke yesterday about the vote.
Speaker 2: But let me be clear, however this folk turns out,
this fight will and must continue. Democrats must fight because
of millions of millions of family will lose health care coverage.
We must fight because children who are dying of cancer
will not get health care coverage. We must fight because
a senior citizen cannot afford to pay twenty five thousand
dollars a year just for health insurance. We must fight
to keep millions from financial ruin. And make no mistake
about it, the American people know who is inflicting this
healthcare trauma on them, Donald Trump and the Republicans.
Speaker 1: Hmmm, is that a guy you want leading you into battle? Man?
He fights? He said fight like four times there, three
or four times, so you know he fights because he
said we have to keep fighting for health care costs
to be lower. Which is weird because I remember, wait
a minute, yeah I do. I remember that I was
promised lower health care costs I don't know about fifteen
years ago. That's why we had to take over a
sixth of the economy through Obamacare. Yeah. In fact, there's
a influencer guy named Mays Moore, and he put together
a couple of highlights of Barack Obama telling us this
very thing.
Speaker 3: It will actually reduce the deficit by four trillion dollars
over the long term. Reducing the waste and inefficiency in
Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan.
It will slow the growth of healthcare costs for our families,
our businesses, and our government. There will be a provision
in this plan that requires us to come forward with
more spending cuts if the savings we promised don't materialize.
Speaker 1: Lies all lies. This has been the problem. This was foreseen,
it was predictable. It was predicted people like me saying
at the time, this is going to drive up the
cost of healthcare. And it did. And now we're supposed
to pay off the insurance companies because that's what happens,
that's what the subsidies are, right, We're paying off insurance
companies with taxpayer dollars. It's absurd. I saw a great point.
The answer to these problems is not more socialistic policy. Okay.
The problem is people inject this kind of soft socialism
into the free market system, and then when the free
market starts sputtering because of this poison that you've injected,
then people start blaming the free market, and it's not
the fault of the free market, it's the fault of
the socialism. And then people are like, well, we got
to have more socialism then, yeah, to kill the patient.
That's what this is has been about from the beginning.
For people who weren't paying attention during the Obamacare fight,
we all knew that this was the point. It was
to break the system. I'm frankly surprised it only took
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According to the Independent Journal Review IJR dot com, the
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that a vote to
extend the Obamacare subsidies, which is not guaranteed to pass,
is insufficient as part of this deal because that's one
of the things that they got promised, which was we'll
give you a we'll give you a vote on the
subsidies as a standalone vote, and that's not going to pass.
It's not going to pass, so it may get through
the House, but it is unlikely to get sixty votes
to pass in the Senate and overcome a filibuster, so
you didn't really get anything there. Senate Majority Leader John
Thune has offered Democrats a vote on extending the ACA subsidies.
He's been offering them this since mid October, okay, for weeks.
Washington Representative Representative Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional
Progressive Caucus, took to the Twitter machine and said, quote,
caving on a deal that doesn't fix healthcare, which isn't broken.
You guys already fixed it with Obamacare. What are you
talking about? She says, Caving on a deal that doesn't
fix healthcare is and always has been a giant betrayal
of the American people. Hold the line save healthcare. I'm
a no on anything that doesn't extend a subsidies. Remember,
the subsidies were put in place by Democrats without Republican support,
and they were the ones who made the subsidies temporary.
They did this on multiple occasions. This is of their
own doing. They authored the legislation. Now why would they
make them temporary. Well, as we heard in the clip
of lies from Barack Obama, right, they wanted to make
this thing when they originally crafted Obamacare. They wanted to
make this thing appear from a budgetary gimmick standpoint, as
if it was funded, as if it would not be
the mess that it is. And so they had all
of these you know, accounting tricks that they put in there.
And one of them was to phase out the subsidies
and the subsidies, and then of course they kept extending
them because people would complain because the healthcare calls kept
going up and up and up and up, and so
they kept extending them, leaving the sunset provisions in the
latest round came during COVID. Charles C. W. Cook at
National Review, he says, my take on why the Democrats
shutdown failed is that they never admitted that they shut
down the government, and so their claims to be fighting
sounded weird and still do right, you shut down the government.
This is why the messaging like they never would take ownership.
They didn't want any ownership of the shutdown, even though
they were the ones that were blocking passage of the
Clean Continuing Resolution to keep the funding going. They were
the ones that said, you have to put more spending
into the clean CR or the CCR. You have to
put what we want in there, or else we're not
going to support it. And that shut the government down.
So that's your fault. Because the clean CR passed the
House and it had the votes, it had a majority support,
bipartisan majority support in the Senate, it just didn't have
enough to clear the filibuster. That was a you decision,
You Democrat leadership decision. There's a fella by the name
of Mike Fragoso, and he was a former counsel to
Senator Mitch McConnell and the Senate Judiciary Republicans, and he
lays out sort of the politics of this behind the scenes.
He says, Schumer should put his head in a bag.
I'm thinking like a paper bag kind of deal. You know.
During the Biden years, the Senate passed many CRS mini budgets,
omnibus bills supplemental funding. This was obviously bipartisan because of
the filibuster. At the time, the Heritage and Steering Crew
howled that the same fourteen Republicans kept giving the Democrats
sixty votes to bust the deficit or whatever, in contravention
of the Republican conferences. Will right, You always had these
fourteen Republican traders, Mitch McConnell being one of them. Eventually,
one of the more responsible members ran the numbers and
found only fourteen Republicans refused to vote for any of
these bills, meaning that it was the ultras, the ultra conservatives,
who were the rump and a super majority of the
conference was in fact willing to play ball depending on circumstances.
So what does this have to do with Schumer. Well,
McConnell and Thune always voted with the majority, contrary to
the folks at Heritage and the Steering Committee attacks. It
wasn't because they necessarily liked the bills. It was because
vote no but hope yes has no place in leadership
as a strategy. It would be dishonorable to go to
your members ask them for a hard vote while you
take a walk for ideological or political reasons. So when
you need to persuade the conference to take a hard
vote for your side, like Kavanaugh or the one big
beautiful bill or acquitting the President, they're going to be
more likely to follow you if they know that you
always lead from the front. The Republican Conference vests comparatively
little power in its leader. He has to persuade more
than command. Democrat Caucus rules empower their leader. Though he
governs with fear, He's a comfortable pollaburo general with conscripts
afraid of the guns behind them. Perhaps this past weekend
the troops stopped being afraid and defied him on a
consequential vote. Handing progressives a staggering defeat, or perhaps he
authorized the defection. Either way, it's bad for him. In
other words, Schumer either lost control of it this caucus
or sent out his veterans on a suicide mission, not
to protect the caucus but to protect him. Either way,
he should be mortified. His members should remember, as should Republicans.
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dot Com. Let me jump over to the WBT text
line driven by Liberty Buick GMC message from Jason. They
also passed Obamacare to see what was in the bill. Remember,
this was the worst thing that could happen to healthcare.
This just made healthcare from bad to worse. Yeah, we
had to pass the bill to find out what's in there.
Tell me it was that John Conyers, right, wasn't that
who that was? They tell me, you gotta read the bill.
You gotta read the bill. No one reads the bills.
And then I think it was Pelosi who said we
have to pass it to know what's in it. That
was yeah, because they just offloaded the responsibility to write
all the rules to Kathleen Sibelius. The Health and Human
Services Secretary. John appreciated the CCR joke. You're welcome. Jeanie
in Gastonia says, thank you, Pete for the hard work
and dedication and time that you put in bringing us
the latest informative information. Our family appreciates it. Just hope
others do as well. They don't, Geenie, they don't. Hi kid,
I appreciate it. Thank you very much for the kind words.
And random seven O four number says good show. And
Tony sent me a picture of snow along the road.
Don't know where that is? Oh, just north of Ashville.
There you go, it's snowing north of Ashville. Where where
should I go? Well, but oh, okay, let me go
over here. Do you know who Peter Welch is. Of
course you don't. He's a US senator from Vermont, Okay,
and uh, I think he is of the Uh I
think he is of the the jam Fame. I actually don't.
It's just his last name is Welch. So anyway, Senator
Peter Welch in comments Listen, he actually acknowledges here. He
admits that Obamacare has failed. That's at the heart of
the Democrats position is that when we were in charge,
we implemented this massive government takeover on promises that it
would bend the cost curve. That was what was told
to us, that it was going to, you know, stabilize
the prices, drive them down. Heck, we even called it
the Affordable Care Act. How damn care not become affordable now?
But they failed. My belief was always that that was intentional.
I expected it to collapse way earlier than fifteen years.
But here we are. But for the subsidies. It probably
would have collapsed much earlier because it had to, because
it is an unworkable model. It always was. It was
designed to fail. Like I've literally been saying this since
Obamacare was passed. This would have been what two thousand
and nine, twenty ten or something, and the Tea Party
years took over based in part on this kind of
this kind of legislation. But you can you can only
ration a limited good or service in one of two ways,
either by cost or by access. That's it, because it's
it's a limited good or service, So you cannot provide
it for free for everyone. It is impossible to do.
And you may try to trick the invisible hand of
the free market, but you will not succeed because the
free market is just us. I've been saying this for years.
You are the free market, I am the free market. Capitalism.
But they call it, you know, Marx called it capitalism
to make it a slur, but it's just freedom. It's
the freedom to choose, and it's sending individual signals to producers, retailers, right, consumers.
When you make a purchase at a store and the
item you're buying is on sale, right, you're sending a
signal that you will buy that item when it is
on sale, but maybe you won't buy it when it's
not on sale, which sends the message to the producer,
to the retailer, hey, you know what, our prices are
too high if they're not moving their merchandise. Prices are
too high. If they cut the prices to try to
move the merch and people still don't buy it, well,
that's sending signals that people don't want it. Now if
people do want it, and you end up with this
like like a like I don't say black market, but
on the resale market, and people are buying like your shoes,
like your new, latest, hottest sneakers, and you sell them
for one hundred dollars and they sell out immediately, then
it's like, oh, maybe we should raise those prices a
little bit higher so they don't sell out immediately. So
you raise them to five hundred dollars, and they still
sell out immediately. That sends another signal that you can
raise the price even more. I mean, that's it. That's
all the free market is. It's just every individual making
a choice at any given moment. You're talking an infinite
number of data points. This is why a command control
economy or command control industry. This idea that, oh, if
we just put people that are technocrats that know what
they're doing, we put them in charge of the system,
and they'll be able to manage all of this stuff.
The hubris, the conceit of that. There's no way that
you will be able to replace a system that allows
billions of people to make infinite numbers of choices at
any given moment in time. You can't do it. This
was always the fatal flaw in Obamacare. There were many,
I mean, and I've talked about them for years. You've
got the woodwork effect right where people quote come out
of the woodwork. They always underestimate the number of people
that want the free stuff, like, yeah, you made it free,
which of course it's not free. And so Peter welch
Suh admits Obamacare was a failure.
Speaker 4: I owe you an answer on why it is I'm
standing here today asking to extend something that was temporary.
And here here's the reason we did fail to bring
down the cost of healthcare.
Speaker 1: We know, we know, So no, you don't get an
extra four hundred billion dollars to now quote fix it,
which is an It's not a fix, it's subsidizing failure.
All right. If you're listening to this show, you know
I try to keep up with all sorts of current events,
and I know you do too. And you've probably heard
me say get your news from multiple sources. Why well,
because it's how you detect media bias, which is why
I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app
and it's a website and it combines news from around
the world in one place so you can compare coverage
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a few months ago and more recently chose to work
with them as an affiliate because it lets me see
clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind
spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the
left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot Ground
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Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent.
Uh seven oh four number On the text line, A
message says, Pete, Oh, it's Joe. Okay, so I'll write
Joe in here, so now we will always know that
this is Joe. See how that works. Boom Joe, and
then I hit save and now that's Joe. Just a
correction for you, Pete. Chuck Schumer's speech had seven fights,
a cancer, a trauma, and a Trump. I mean, I
will take your word from that. I lost count. I
did not count all of them. And the next thing, Oh, Kevin,
Obamacare does lower cost both for those that are sick
through no fault of their own and those that stuff
their face at Golden Corral are one hundred and fifty
pounds overweight Communist Socialist permission structure. I'm going to pay
the same for my healthcare, so why take care of
my health It ticks me off that I have to
pay for it. Through higher premiums other people's poor life choices. Right, Well,
that's all insurance. That's the problem with all insurance and
risk pools, the whole model. And when Obamacare was being debated,
like there's so many different directions, I can go with
this because there because this fight was raging for like
a year. So the better way to have gone about
reforming or I should just say driving down the price
of healthcare, The thing to do is to remove the
third parties that are between you and your doctor. That
includes the insurance companies and it includes GOV. Go right,
get both of them out of this mix as much
as possible. You then have the catastrophic policies that you
that you can go out to the marketplace and get
a catastrophic policy for you know, for things that are
not h not known right in the event of a catastrophe.
But make everything point of purchase. Like you don't use
your car insurance to pay for oil changes, and if
you did, your oil changes would be super expensive.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Why is health insurance treated differently than car insurance, right,
or any other form of insurance for that matter. It's
just it's a broken model. And this was made very
clear to me the first time I got an HSA
and I went into the doctor's office and they asked
me if I wanted a technis shot and I said, well,
I don't know. I said, I'm paying for it with
an HSA, so like what's the price? And he was like,
I don't know. That's a problem, right, don't you think
you're offering services and you don't even know what the
price is. So and I don't fault him because everything
just runs through an insurance company, and there are cheaper rates,
by the way, if you pay cash, if you offer
to pay cash, you'll get lower costs at the doctor's office.
And so when he asked his you know, he asked
the nurse to go check out what the price was
before I would agree to get it. And she came
back and it was like seventy dollars for a tetnis shot.
And I was like, mm, yeah no, and he's like, yeah,
just come back if you step on a nail. So
you make a different decision when you know what the
price is, right, you can. It is a way for
you then to assess is this good or service worth
the price that they're charging. But when you get when
you're masked to that cost when it's hidden through an
insurance company. And then the government did subsidizing the insurance companies,
so then they have an incentive to raise the prices
because you don't see it. They're going to build the government.
Oh and then the subsidy goes away, and oh no,
now you have to come out of pocket for it. Now,
Oh my gosh, it's way too expensive. They also broke
it with the plans Gold, Silver, Bronze. I was on
Obamacare for a year after I got let go up
in Ashville, and then when I got hired and started
got a health insurance, had to pay a penalty because
of the previous year. So at a time when I
was on their plan and they were giving it to
me for like eight dollars or something, it was ridiculous,
and I was making income, but I launched the podcast,
so they couldn't rate the income, so they didn't know
how much I was making as a self employed person,
so they just said, well, we'll give it to you
for free. And then I get hired here and then
I have to pay a massive penalty for the previous
year when I wasn't making that money. Like it's just absurd.
The whole thing. The whole program was absurd, but I
believe it's absurd and it was built of and I
believe that from the beginning because Ted Kennedy told Obama
the biggest regret he had was not doing the deal
with Nixon for the Medicare for All. Had he gone
ahead and done little that component of the socialized medicine
that Kennedy wanted, then they'd have been further down the
road to a fully government controlled system. And then you
will have your care rationed by access. That's the deal,
all right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. I could not do the show
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